Three Tunes Tuesday: Cannonball Adderley LIVE (OK, not live as in playing right now, but, all videos today)!

I remember hearing Cannonball Adderley for the first time and thinking, "I didn't know the sax could even sound like that!" It was like discovering a new tree in jazz, grown up around a cannonball ... weird, but wonderful!

Image by orythys from Pixabay

Of course, I didn't know the difference between soprano, alto, and tenor sax back then ... but Cannonball Adderley's music is a glorious education in jazz, all the way around!

I thought of this piece because Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States was yesterday, and the music of the Civil Rights Movement drew heavily on Negro Spirituals and the related work songs my enslaved ancestors used to maintain their humanity, their rhythm, their own music, and their hope. Black working men in particular down through the mid-20th century were known to maintain the work songs as they worked in chain gangs during the country's long period of debt peonage (in essence, one could be re-enslaved if one were in debt). Cannonball Adderley draws on all that history in "Work Song," here presented in 1962, before civil rights was fully established. This is Cannonball Adderley's acknowledgment of the need for CHANGE, put forward in amazing music.

This may be the only available video in the world, if we believe the description of this video, of Cannonball Adderley playing his greatest hit! Listen and watch him, Nat Adderley, and Joe Zawinul GO!

I have been thinking of "A Night in Tunisia" because of its influence on a recent composition of mine -- it is itself a striking piece of music, and Cannonball Adderley's is among the most striking interpretations of it!